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The Factory Floor is hosted by the three co-founders of Conversion Factory, the marketing agency at the forefront of SaaS growth, marketing, and tech trends. Episodes are released on Twitter one day early, @coreyhainesco.
Every other week Corey, Zach, and Nick break down what’s working right now in SaaS marketing, share real-world lessons from the field, and give you the strategies you need to outpace the competition.
You can also find us on YouTube, X, and everywhere you listen to podcasts!
Don't fall behind. Subscribe. Like. Drop a comment. Or not. The ball is in your court.
Nick Loudon (00:00)
Me, me, me, me. I'm good. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the factory floor. We are joined by, of course, the two tried and true, well, it's me and then the listeners, of course. I am the factory floor and you guys are merely my guests every single week. Yeah.
Zach Stevens (00:11)
ourselves.
Corey Haines (00:19)
Mm. We're just recurring guests.
Nick Loudon (00:22)
That's
right, ⁓ Corey Haynes and Zach Stevens. How we doing today? Are we good? Good. Yeah, no problem. Yeah. Yeah, you guys better perform, but because if this doesn't work out the next week, we're getting somebody else. ⁓ OK, so this week, what I would like to do is ⁓ ask Corey some questions because in case you haven't been on Twitter recently, there's a lot of
Corey Haines (00:27)
Good. Thanks for having us on your podcast. Appreciate it.
Zach Stevens (00:30)
Yeah,
thank you so much.
Nick Loudon (00:52)
things happening in the world of AI newsflash. And ⁓ Corey was a little bit of like a key part of it recently. Yeah. ⁓ Which he released a marketing skills for Claude code. And so what I'd like to do is just ask him about that. Like what, what did he put out? What is it? Like, what is the skill if anyone doesn't know if they're listening and then what spawned from that? Cause you've been on some podcasts, you've gone and spoken at some places. So
Zach Stevens (00:59)
Superstar.
Nick Loudon (01:22)
Give us a rundown, like what happened a few weeks ago that sparked ⁓ all this happenings.
Corey Haines (01:28)
Yeah, I think it was like the last week of January and I was just starting to play around with some skills in claude code for coding and design. And then I was like, hmm, I wonder if there's any for marketing and or copywriting or how that would work. And so I made my own to kind of experiment with it. And I just like kept it open source and public and GitHub. And, ⁓ and then I was like, this actually seems to be working like really well. It's really good at copywriting.
good at like a lot of the recurring types of tasks that we do at Conversion Factory. ⁓ And I was already trying to get my team, the marketing team at Conversion Factory up to speed on like, here are some workflows, here's some different types of things that we can and should be doing, where we can, you know, connect to the Ahrefs MCP and do keyword research, or we can ⁓ go look through a bunch of, you know, ideas from our 140.
SaaS marketing ideas, ebook, and then match them, I guess, a client and all those types of things. And then I was like, I think that this is probably something that could do well that other people are gonna use if they're already using claude code. And so I like kind of launched it, but then it really took off like honestly way more than I initially expected. And I think because every other skill out there, which I'll explain what a skill is in a second,
every other skill out there already ⁓ was just focused on like super, super technical things. ⁓ But as we know, coding and programming is getting really, really easy. And so what people have an appetite for now are all the things that are not related for coding and programming. It's for marketing, it's for design, it's for sales, it's for customer support. ⁓ And Claude Code is this
this tool, this vehicle that allows you to do so much more than a chat GPT. And so these skills kind of give claude code, which is already a really powerful tool, even more tools and capabilities and basically steers it in the right direction. So like a skill is a markdown file with a bunch of rules about what to do and what not to do. And so I made a skill pack. There was just a bunch of skills altogether in an open source repo.
Zach Stevens (03:55)
way that you described skills to me was that they are essentially an SOP, like a standard operating procedure for ⁓ an AI tool to follow, which is great because then what you're doing, it's like essentially you're giving the bot a framework for this is how I think about these scenarios and how I make the decisions. In the context of marketing, it could be something like,
Lots of if this then that scenarios. Do you have a positioning doc? If no, create one. If you do have one, great. Does your homepage reflect it? Does the copy on the homepage reflect the CTAs and the value propositions and all those other items? Does it have a glossary for the terms that we need to use for this industry? So essentially taking all the things that you do and putting them into a very codified format for the bot to follow.
Corey Haines (04:49)
Yeah. Yeah. And then giving the bot instructions about how to do it too. That's one, that's one of the biggest differences is how most people are used to using AI is you talk with ChatGPT, Hey, I need to do this thing. It tells you, cool, here's step one, step two, step three. And here's the thing that you paste into your email marketing tool. And then you have to go and do that and follow the directions that the AI gives you now with claude code, it just does it for you and skills make that
SOP in that process, workflow much clearer. And so now you're not like the middle man anymore of, you know, being in between AI and your tool where the work is actually happening. Claude code now is the thing bouncing between you and the tool and just doing it on your behalf. And that unlocks a lot because AI is, you know, thousands of times faster than we are.
Zach Stevens (05:24)
Mm.
Corey Haines (05:50)
And so when you can give it these guardrails, you can do a lot more than you ever thought was possible.
Nick Loudon (05:56)
Yeah, seems like there's a based on what we've seen over the last few weeks with with your marketing skills thing. Like there's probably a big market for these like adjacent hard skills that aren't like directly related to coding that AI can use to make products and make services a lot better. So I'm really curious to see how that develops. I do want to ask
How did your, so take me from you wrote this thing and then you tweeted about it to like then the next echelon of things that happened, which is you're on some podcasts and in some YouTube videos and speaking at different companies and conferences and things. How did that, how did that take place?
Corey Haines (06:40)
Yeah, so how GitHub works is when you have an open source project, people can give a star, which kind of like saves it for them. But it's also just like a public, you know, count of endorsement essentially. And so, ⁓ you know, pretty quickly it hit like a thousand stars and then it started trending on the front page of GitHub. And then it started circulating around Twitter because it got all these likes. And I think the original tweet got close to like a million impressions. And so just a lot of people saw it.
And claude code and skills had already just started to take off. And so it was kind of already in the zeitgeist of like what tech Twitter was talking about at the moment. And then my repo popped up and just started circulating everywhere. The other factor was that there was, there's this company Vercel which one of their guys, Andrew Wu, he created a skills directory called skills.sh. And by the way, I just learned SH stands for shell.
and Shell is like a command language more or less within your terminal. So ⁓ it's called skills.sh and it's a directory, marketplace, a big listing of all the skills out there. And then they made, they kind of wrapped it around some, ⁓ like a package manager in NPX. And so then my skills all started trending on the skills directory and then they had done a lot of marketing around it and it blew up on their end, which just kind of perpetuate.
the momentum that was gaining with the marketing skills repo. And that was crazy because then, you know, there's all these companies publishing skills for the first time. know, Vercel has published the skills, Anthropic, ⁓ Microsoft, and then it was like Corey Haynes 31. And so I think for a lot of people, that was the first time that they're like, who is this guy? And like,
Zach Stevens (08:28)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (08:36)
What is this? What are the marketing skills? And there were so many, I think I published 22 initially. Like Vercel published one, they published Vercel React best practices, I think it's called. I published 22, so it just kind of dominated the front page of the directory. And everybody started seeing it, it's only one command away from installing. And got a lot of ⁓ hype that way. So then Vercel.
decided that they wanted to launch a couple of parties around the US. So San Francisco, New York and London, and they offered to fly me to attend SF and then to speak in New York, which I just did last week to talk about how I made the skills, what they do. It was like a six minute lightning demo, but, ⁓ and then people have asked me to go on podcasts. show me this. Show me how this works. I've been getting comments even on Twitter. Like people are like, isn't this just like,
another way to make a bunch of slop. Well, yeah, that's fair. That's what like most people think about AI still. But I think that then they see, here's how you vibe code, but vibe market. And they're like, that's actually very interesting. So yeah, it's just captured people's attention.
Nick Loudon (09:37)
you
Zach Stevens (09:56)
It sounds like it'd be the equivalent of putting a synth in the hands of a really capable musician. like, sure, could, it could very much make slop, but in the hands of somebody that knows what they're doing and is very creative, it's actually just going to make your life a lot easier.
Corey Haines (10:14)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And that's my suspicion is I think that, you know, it's got over 10,000 stars now on GitHub. I think like something maybe like 3000 forks or something, which are like people directly copying it into their own GitHub. I think maybe a couple of hundred have like used it end to end with like one skill, probably only a handful of really used.
all the skills, their full capabilities. So it's still like, you've got this powerful tool, but no one's really fully utilizing it yet. We'll see if that changes, but yeah, it can be a slot machine if you're, if you have sloppy tastes, but if you're an expert, then that's a really powerful tool.
Nick Loudon (10:53)
Yeah.
Yeah, it was funny when we were all together, because in case anyone doesn't know, obviously we run an agency. And so we're like adopting and learning all these AI tools and like adding to. So we were all together, like setting up Claude and doing some things for just the three of us. And Corey was like, OK, go to skills.sh. And I was reading through the list. And it was like, entropic, entropic, Vercell.
Corey Haynes 31, Anthropic. I was like, this is like a comical. This is so funny and random. ⁓ When does marketing skills 2.0 come out? Or is it like, are you gonna add to it as it goes? Or how does this work in terms of like the evolution of these skills? Like, is this something that you wanna add to? Is it like, there's new ones that will come out that you're like, well, this is a better version or how will that look as it evolves?
Corey Haines (11:53)
Yeah, we're already on a version 1.3. So we've had three updates, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3. I've been doing it like every week or two ish and just trying to listen to feedback. There's people that have, cause it's open source, you can, you can either add an issue, which is like, Hey, this thing is missing or broken, or you can add a pull request, which is I built this. Now I want to merge it into the repo. So there's been quite a few people who are like, I need this, I need this, or it'd be cool if it worked this way and did that thing.
Um, so it's already evolved like a lot since the beginning, where from the beginning there was just the 22 skills. Now I think there's 32. I also added a bunch of tools and integrations where basically Claude would have to write a lot of manual integrations with some of these tools. Like, uh, let's just say webflow, for example, where it would have to figure out, okay, let's go find web flows API. Let's see how it works.
let's write the scripts to be able to like interact with Webflow and do the things that we want it to. Maybe we want to like, you know, send a blog post into the CMS. Well, now I just built all the integrations and CLIs into the repo so that it didn't have to build it from scratch. It just says, okay, let's use this script for Webflow. And that's how we know to, you know, get the blog posts in the right way. So there's like 52, I think tools and integrations, and those can either be
⁓ MCPs, CLIs, command line interface, which is basically a little wrapper in your terminal to be able to more easily do things. And it just tells Claude how to interact with outside services. And yeah, I'm gonna be adding some more soon. Probably the next stage, what I'm gonna be doing is just like short commands. So how the skills get triggered is you have to kind of trigger them via a keyword.
You'd be like, ⁓ you know, Claude, I'm working on SEO. What should I do to improve? And then it's like, SEO, do we have a skill for that? ⁓ we do. Let's use the SEO audit. But now you can maybe just type slash SEO and then it'll initialize directly calling that skill and then be like, let me start an audit for you. Let me suggest some improvements. Let me data data. I, I, the other thing, like, I don't know where it's going to go. I have no idea where this is going to land.
I don't even know. It was funny because a week after ⁓ publishing the repo, Vercel came out with a study in a blog post that I think flew under the radar a little bit, which was that ⁓ skills in their current form of being individual markdown files, all separate. AI had like a 60 % hit rate of correctly calling and invoking the skills at the right time. But if they compressed,
Nick Loudon (14:19)
You
Corey Haines (14:48)
all the files into one massive markdown file that was digitally compressed so that it was a smaller file size and easier to read. It had 100 % hit rate. So they were like, everybody compress your skills. But there's no good way to do that. there's probably gonna be a future where marketing skills is just one giant file versus right now it's like a couple of hundred files. Yeah.
Nick Loudon (15:13)
I see.
Zach Stevens (15:14)
Several.
Corey Haines (15:17)
Like altogether, if you split them out, you know.
Nick Loudon (15:20)
So rather than having like, this one's for copywriting, this one's for SEO, this one's for X, Y, and Z, those would all be compressed into one and it's just marketing. So anytime you're asking anything related to marketing to Claude, it'll just reference that and then find that piece of the markdown. Is that what you're saying?
Corey Haines (15:35)
Right, it'll
just go to that section. If you say SEO, it'll go to the marketing skill and then it'll search for the SEO section and then follow that. It'll all be the exact same content. It's just packaged differently.
Nick Loudon (15:43)
of the one. Yeah.
Interesting.
Zach Stevens (15:49)
What,
how easy is it for somebody to get started with it? What should they count on there being the,
the most value within those skills. Like, if you're gonna pick one thing out of these skills, this is the GOAT, maybe like the top three. You go over to the top three things inside of those skills that everybody should utilize. perhaps even better question, like what's the order by which you establish them? Or does the AI already know how to do that? Like, it walk you through the steps.
Corey Haines (16:19)
Yeah.
So the skill repo will tell you like the order of operations and it can also give you recommendations. In fact, one of the things I mentioned in New York at my talk was one of the things I found to be the most useful when starting out with a skill is you don't want to have to read through the skills themselves. Like it's not really important for you to know and memorize the information, but if you just ask Claude to do that for you and say, Hey, how do I use the skill?
it can do all the work of thinking for you and ⁓ you're supposed to do this first and then you do this and then you do this because sometimes you can wrongly prescribe directions to Claude and you're like, Hey Claude, ⁓ start with the SEO skill and do this, this, this. And when in reality you're supposed to start with the product marketing context skill, which is how I have a setup where everything starts with product marketing context, which is your positioning targeting audience.
Zach Stevens (16:58)
skill.
Corey Haines (17:16)
⁓ information about your product capabilities, things that it does, things that it doesn't do so that you're not like hallucinating features. ⁓ That skill sets all that up for you. And then every other skill references the product marketing context skill so that it's loaded with the right info about you and your product and what you're working on. And then there's other skills that reference each other. Like there's an SEO audit skill.
But then if you wanted to get into AI SEO things, then it actually branches off into a different skill, you know, dedicated to AI SEO. ⁓ so probably where I would start is product marketing context. That's always like, and if you just use that one skill and then he just told Claude, don't use the other marketing skills, but write copy from my website, it's probably still going to get you better results because
Nick Loudon (17:58)
Mm-hmm.
results.
Corey Haines (18:13)
it's actually knows about your product instead of just trying to make it up or do like a generic web search, ⁓ which it can hallucinate all the time. Cause it'll, you know, maybe it goes to, ⁓ some review blog posts from three years ago about your product. And now all those things are out of date or absolute, right? It might not even go to your own website or it might go through your website, but
It doesn't go through all the pages, just looks at the homepage and your homepage only has 30 % of what your product can really do, right? So ⁓ product marketing context. ⁓ I do think that the copywriting skill is like pretty good at writing decent copy. The programmatic SEO one is really cool because that's one of the most difficult things to do and to do right. And I've even had a couple of people do it. You guys know Carlos, Carlos Arbona, shout out to him.
Nick Loudon (19:07)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (19:08)
He used it to publish like 4,000, no, no, no, like 24,000 pages on his new startup. ⁓ And like they're all perfect. Like they're just, they're just done. And he did it in a couple of days, kind of going through it step by step and went through a couple of iterations, but that's one of those very niche things that's hard to execute, right? And then the SEO audit one is also really good because especially when you're spinning up a new website,
in Next.js for example, it's gonna do things more built for an app, not a website. And so you do the SEO audit and then it's going to clean up and add all the things that you need in order to be up to spec for SEO.
Zach Stevens (19:51)
Very cool, that's especially useful if you have a product that creates a lot of, like a huge amount of data, like swipe well, is, you know, super cool. Nice.
Corey Haines (19:58)
Yeah. Yeah.
Nick Loudon (20:02)
I was going to ask because one of my favorite things is like there's a lot of agencies that are
Like a lot of agencies, I think die because they're unwilling to adapt. Like they have a certain way that they've done things for a really long time and it worked for a set period of time. And then as industry shift and as tools shift, they kind of refuse to adapt and die out. That's one of the things I really like about working with you two specifically is because both of you are like, like the new thing and want to see if we can get the new thing to work with our business. And so that's like.
That's kind of my first, the context for my question, is it seems like there's a bunch of marketers out there who are like just scraping the surface of AI and being like, look how awesome this is. Look at this snow. just like scraped off the top. It's all powdered and it's blue. It's beautiful. Like they're like, I can feed this into chat. GPT. And it will tell me if the
headings are messed up or I can write a blog with chat GBT like that is the surface that they're scraping and they have no idea that there's like all this valuable or and stuff just under if they just dig a little bit deeper. And this to me seems like kind of the start of that like you're we're digging in and we're being like, okay, this is a way to implement a very serious and deep workflow using AI to do a ton of things. And it has the brain sitting right here.
how long before the normal marketing people can handle this kind of like normal marketing people who have no coding background or even no like development background, even using no code tools, how long before they can do this kind of thing without needing like serious handholding. That's like kind of my biggest concern with the way that marketing is shifting with AI.
Corey Haines (21:47)
Mm-hmm.
I think until the time until it feels normal for everyday marketers is like, this is your standard tool set. It is gonna be like a few years probably. They're just, mean, we went to a conference, you know, just a few weeks ago and I don't think I talked to a single person who had even, who had even touched claude code or really even knew what it was. Yeah, like.
Zach Stevens (22:06)
Mm-hmm.
Right? Yeah.
Nick Loudon (22:20)
Really?
Yeah.
Corey Haines (22:25)
But okay, but the flip side of that is that I don't think claude code is like the final tool that we all should be using for marketing. ⁓ The fact is that like using the terminal is not a very user friendly experience. And it takes a lot of finessing your terminal, claude, claude code, your setup, integrating with other tools. ⁓ And so like, I think that that's gonna be
Nick Loudon (22:41)
It's not.
Corey Haines (22:54)
That's going to be the thing that we do really, really well. And like, if you're cutting edge, that's going to be the way that you do it. But long-term, we're all going to find ways to take claude code and put it into the browser and have those connections all set up for you. That's basically the point of Magister, the new thing that's kind of branched off of marketing skills. Cause there was all these people that were like, I've never even touched a terminal before how to do this. And I made codingformarketers.com And then everybody in the discord is like, can I just use
Zach Stevens (23:05)
everything.
Corey Haines (23:24)
Claude and Claude Cowork? I'm like, no. The point is to use something that has all the tools outside of what you can do in the browser. So now we're setting up a way to take all the power of the terminal, but put it in the browser. So there's gonna be tools like Magister and others. There's even like Manus now ⁓ that have these built-in connectors and essentially are like are literally running Claude code under the hood. They're using the Claude code SDK, which means that they are
taking claude code. Yeah, 100%.
Zach Stevens (23:56)
Really? Manus is
running off of the claude code SDK, even though it's powered by Meta. I mean, yeah, but we all knew that.
Corey Haines (24:03)
Yeah. And so is OpenClaw. ⁓ OpenClaw uses the claude code SDK.
Yeah, no, but, that's what Manus did was they basically forked to open claw and then they like, it's like, okay, did they do it? Did they really not? It's kind of a bunch of same difference, right? It doesn't really matter. ⁓ but yeah, detail wise, like claude code right now is the gold standard for agentic AI. And so everybody is using claude code under the hood. It's just a matter of the interface and the connectors and how they're harnessing claude code under the hood.
Nick Loudon (24:43)
Yeah, we, we started, I know you showed us, were like, Hey, use the, we should use this, the meat, the blueberry. And I was like, this is a new thing. There's other versions of this, right? There's, you know, like, what is a, I was basically like researching, yeah, cursor and all the other ones. I was like, okay, what are the other options? And basically AI was like, they're all good. And this is brand new. So just pick one because they all are trying to learn and do new things. So like,
Corey Haines (24:57)
cursor.
Nick Loudon (25:12)
Claude is the only thing that's kind of like right now, it's kind of settled that this is what you should use for this specific purpose. But like even where you use it is not set in stone. Like there's not a standard toolkit that makes the most sense for all the use cases, which is like, dude, I cannot wait to figure it. Like there's gonna be, in three months, there's gonna be a new tool that's like, Claude inside this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's like gonna be so awesome. So I'm just waiting to see what that'll be.
Corey Haines (25:25)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's the difference right now too. I think it's the user experience. So claude code in their terminal is not a great user experience, but that will not be true. Probably in three to six months, like you said, ⁓ we're, already seeing that like with, with Magister, just a little sneak peek really quick is that we've gotten like our MVP up and it's basically claude code in the browser. Now you still have to know how to prompt it, what to do.
you have to do some work to grab API keys, things like that, right? But ⁓ now that we've solved the claude code thing of like agentic AI workflows, now we're going back to the interface, the UX, the user experience and making that a friendlier, easier to use.
Nick Loudon (26:33)
Yeah, we, okay, so we had another topic that we were gonna talk about. I'm wondering if we save it for another day because we've already been talking, I think, for about 30 minutes on this. Unless you guys want to hit that. Save it. Okay, cool. Any other final thoughts on the Claude marketing skills ⁓ adventure that you went on over the last three weeks? What was the best food you had in New York? How about that?
Corey Haines (26:44)
Yeah, let's save it.
⁓ I had some really killer pizza and pasta, of course. That's one my go-tos. No, I think the only other part about this that I would love to hear from you guys on is ⁓ building is no longer reserved for programmers and developers, which has been a theme and feels even a little bit cliche to say because over the last year especially, the agent of guys come a long way and there's things like Claude Code that make...
Nick Loudon (27:04)
Wait.
Corey Haines (27:27)
make that very easy. But now you guys are seeing we're not just even for building apps, but using claude code for marketing, for design, for other things. Like now anybody and everybody can build.
And especially like if what you were good at was writing code and now you don't need to write code. Well, what else were you good at? Now you kind of have to reinvent yourself a little bit, to be honest. But if you were really good at design and now you don't need to code. Well, you're still really, really good at design. In fact, now you're better at design because you can build more faster.
Nick Loudon (28:09)
This is where Zach owns us. Zach runs the whole world because he's the only one who has like the true eye for what looks good. And he's now wielding a new like weapon that is more powerful than anything he's wielded. And his his artistry can like go straight through it and work really, really fast. So I think the world is changing and Zach is going to ⁓
Corey Haines (28:12)
Hahaha
Nick Loudon (28:36)
Zach is gonna poop on all of us, honestly.
Zach Stevens (28:40)
You guys can hear me okay? know my mic was acting kind of weird.
Nick Loudon (28:44)
Just pull it up a little bit closer maybe.
Corey Haines (28:44)
I think it's switched, but...
Zach Stevens (28:47)
It did switch to my MacBook, but I think we're okay. Okay. Good. It's not coming through a tin can or anything. Good. no, think the paradigm, the paradigm shifted really, really fast. was like within, within a week, there were things that I've been saying for years. Like it's AI is good, but I don't have the kind of control that I need to get designs where I.
Nick Loudon (28:49)
I can still hear, we can still hear you. It's all good.
Corey Haines (28:51)
It sounds fine.
Zach Stevens (29:14)
And that's always been the curse. like, I don't want to play with it until it is going to give me the results that I'm looking for because it's just wasting my time. became a net loss for me to take what I could do in Figma and Webflow and then try and tell Claude to do it for me. Cause we tried, like we, gave the shots and like a year ago and the answer was no. Like this is not something we can pass up to clients. This is not something that we can ship internally.
And all of a sudden it was like out of the blue, Claude code was good enough to be the hands and feet behind the design ideas that we have. And we're seeing this right now. with the, I'm able to do things like WebGL and create 3D rotating icons from SVGs that I had made in Figma. And I can, because I have Webflow experience and I know how to somewhat talk like developer speak and I can.
give it the proper frameworks to mess for it. Like even just knowing what WebGL is, it's a good command for me to say like, no, I want you to make it like this. Or I need you to adjust these elements within something on a webpage or understanding things like the proper structure and giving like putting our workflows to, to AI, things like this is how we experiment. Like, you know, we do a series of three versions. we refine that one version we like, and then we jump into a
style guide and build off of that. It's cut like there is no design or develop process anymore. It's just making all the things. So, and then I can literally communicate at the speed of thought. Like I'm talking to the machine and saying, I need you to fix this. It's like me directing an army of very technically skilled designers and developers at the same time.
to build stuff. And it's amazing.
Nick Loudon (31:17)
Zach
on several occasions has said, I'm having the most fun with work that I've ever had, or have had in several years at least, which is fun.
Zach Stevens (31:28)
Yeah. Well, and the, and
the cool thing is that the design stuff doesn't go away, right? Like, especially a lot of people hated on the, the Claude code to Figma thing. And I thought it was genius. Like, this is amazing. I can actually, I can have it one shot something. And then I can take it in for granular refinement if I'm not able to get the point across the same way, or there's just some things that are harder to talk about and describe than it would be for me to jump into Figma and adjust it more.
more specifically. So it's amazing.
I don't, feel like design now, and design has always been the idea of crafting with intention. It's the pinnacle because all of it comes down to design. It's not like the technical limitation isn't there really anymore. It's the experience of life. I was listening to a podcast. I listened to the full three hours of Peter Steinberger talking to Lex Friedman about open cloth.
The thing that came up over and over and over again was, yeah, you just get to focus more now on the delight of the product. like Peter took with his German accent. And that word delight, delight, delight, delight, it came up over and over and over again.
And now I feel like we get to do those things that would have been like, that would be really, really cool. But man, that is going to take like a day just to get that really bespoke interaction that you're looking for. And now it's done in 15 minutes, even less.
Nick Loudon (33:04)
Yeah, it's nuts. I think you kind of hit the nail on the head with the, like the lines are blurring so much harder between developers and designers. And it's going to turn into like you have builders and maybe like strategists, but even strategists I feel like is going to end up being in the same builders category. Like I don't see a world too far away. Like if developers can adopt some of the same design visuals and use Claude to
to build beautiful websites and beautiful products, it doesn't seem that crazy that copywriters and marketers could do the same thing. Like it's not that far away. It's just kind of picking up some of the lingo like you were mentioning, but it's pretty nuts. Yeah.
Corey Haines (33:46)
Yeah.
The big thing I've been noticing for myself, right, ⁓ like I took Zach's design and Figma for my personal website and then I started building it in XJS with Claude Code. And there are certain subjective ⁓ things open to interpretation about the design, know, color gradients, animations, ⁓ the use of certain accents and elements across the site that
I'm not as practiced or familiar in, or even have the vocabulary about, like I found myself in claude code being like, okay, in my head, I have this idea of like a shimmer. But then when I say shimmer, what it produces is not what I imagine. What am I imagining? That's was another word for shimmer. That's not shimmer. You know I mean? It's like the more you can expand your vocabulary, the better you're going to be at whatever you're trying to produce.
⁓ So I found myself being like, dang, I just need to know more design lingo, because I don't know how to describe what's in my head and tell it to Claude Code.
Nick Loudon (34:57)
Yeah, I don't know. think there's so much experimenting for us to do and a lot of like taking projects and being like, hey, this is how we're doing it now, switching it up. ⁓ But yeah, I had the same thing where I was like, I should start building my, because again, I also have a, we have all personal sites that Zach designed that we need to spin up. I was like, let me start taking this. And I did kind of the same thing. And I was like, okay, I have a gradient. It's a radial gradient. This is the color, you know, the hex codes or whatever.
And it gave me like, instead of like a from the bottom corner up, it was like a center gradient going out. looked like a big like rainbow. And I was like, dude, this is not what I wanted. Just having to like be more specific and be more like, I should have just given it direct access to the thing I was explaining rather than just pasting it in and being like, this is what you should do. Like, how do we make all those interconnections and all that stuff?
Zach Stevens (35:47)
Yeah,
that's it. is still, you get way quicker haptic feedback. This is why the Figma to claude code thing was fantastic because I can move something where I want it and like get more specific or change an element like that. I to this with the buttons on conversion factory site because they were pissing me off. I was like,
You're not getting me right now. Blueberry and the claude code. So what I did was I took the button in and I wanted a very specific hover state. And said, okay, I'm going to make this hover state real quick. Nailed it two minutes and then send it back to claude code. And it says, make the transitions between all of these elements really smooth and easy. Nailed it. Good to go.
Corey Haines (36:32)
Hmm.
Nick Loudon (36:35)
⁓ we could go back and forth. This is so like, there's so much to talk about. We could just do this on a bunch of stuff for a very long time. So let's wrap. ⁓ Super cool stuff. Corey, thanks for sharing all the awesome stuff about the skills and really excited to see how Claude and all that stuff is gonna change our workflow with the conversion factory. But yeah, thanks for joining the factory floor. We will see you on the next episode. Go, Zach, you have something?
Zach Stevens (36:58)
I think
there's one other thing to add to this, which is what we're talking about right now, like the line between design and development.
It's not happening tomorrow. It's not happening next week. It's not happening next month. We're doing this right now. Like the design team at conversion factory is. Claude code. have the terminal up. We are skipping between like that process. Like it's no longer bifurcated between the dev team and the design team. The designers are in there making changes and it's freaking awesome. So the next time you see us.
we are going to have websites that have been coded in Next.js by our design team.
Nick Loudon (37:45)
That's it. Signing off. Thanks for joining the factory floor. We'll see you next week or next time. Who knows? Peace.
Corey Haines (37:47)
happening.